"There is no greatness where simplicity, goodness and truth
are absent."
Leo Tolstoy

Friday, May 19, 2017

You Can See The End

The Canadian who edits Vanity Fair -- Graydon Carter -- writes that you cannot fight Donald Trump by using the usual tools of resistance:

As anyone who has followed his jerry-rigged career from the 1980s onward
will tell you, Trump just drags you to the bottom of the pond every
time. Decades ago, he was a short-fingered vulgarian
tooling around town in a mauve stretch limo, reeking of Brut. In those
days, competitors, subcontractors, politicians, and wives were the ones
who found themselves mired in the Trump muck. Now it is the country
that’s up to its knees in it.

Carter opines that Trump's presidency is doomed. But until he falls, almost everyone will be suffering from P.T.S.D:

Until that day, you should be forgiven if you think you are suffering
from extreme, full-blown P.T.S.D.—President Trump Stress Disorder. You
are not alone. A serial liar in the office or home is one thing—and
stressful enough. But a serial liar in the highest office in the land is
something else altogether. Couple that with an erratically fragile ego,
a severely diminished mental capacity, a lacerating temper, and access
to the nuclear codes, and it’s going to get a whole lot hotter in here.

If you think you are having a tough time of it since the
election, please have some sympathy for the journalists, career civil
servants, and White House supplicants who have to deal with Trumpian
levels of insanity on a minute-to-minute basis. Trumpian! The
word “trump” formerly was a verb used in polite bridge and whist
circles. Trump, the man, is now up there with Hercules and Sisyphus with
his own branded adjective. I’m not completely sure what it stands for.
But when it finally settles into the lexicon, I’m certain that it will
be a disconcerting combination of petulant, preening, ignorant,
shameless, vulgar, paranoid, vainglorious, reckless, imperious,
impulsive, unhinged, callous, corrosive, narcissistic, intemperate,
juvenile, disloyal, venal, chaotic, squalid—what have I forgotten? Oh,
yes!—and just mind-numbingly, epically incompetent.

Fasten your seat belts. It's going to be a rough ride. But you can see the end.

I like the cartoon - a mad Mr. Toad looking for his next crash like Trump.

A President Pence might not be so great for the States but might be a big improvement for Canada. We hear so much American news that sometimes we forget we are Canadian and our interests are different from those of the Americans. At least, I haven't heard that Pence wants to abolish NAFTA.

Satire seems to work better against Trump than demonstrations. It's never been better for artists in a snarky mood. Time for all of us to access our inner artist and metaphorically thwack the enemy who seem singularly lacking in humour. Maybe that's why SNL is so disturbing to Trump - this is a foreign language to him.

About Me

A retired English teacher, I now write about public policy and, occasionally, personal experience. I leave it to the reader to determine if I practice what I preached to my students for thirty-two years.